Thankful Villages

Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages) are settlements in England and Wales from which all their members of the armed forces survived World War I. The term Thankful Village was popularised by the writer Arthur Mee in the 1930s. In Enchanted Land (1936), the introductory volume to The King’s England series of guides, he wrote that a Thankful Village was one which had lost no men in the Great War because all those who left to serve came home again. His initial list identified 32 villages.

In an October 2013 update, researchers identified 53 civil parishes in England and Wales from which all serving personnel returned. There are no Thankful Villages identified in Scotland or Ireland yet (all of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom).

Fourteen of the English and Welsh villages are considered "doubly thankful", in that they also lost no service personnel during World War II. These are marked with a (D) in the list below.

The researchers acknowledged a number of other villages which have been put forward as Thankful Villages but where they found there to be some uncertainty, generally over the place of residence of a serviceman.

In France, where the human cost of war was higher than in Britain, Thierville in Upper Normandy was remarkable as the only village in all of France with no men lost from World War I, nor any memorials constructed in the subsequent period. Thierville also suffered no losses in the Franco-Prussian War and World War II, France's other bloody wars of the modern era.

On 3 June 2016 singer-songwriter Darren Hayman released the first of three albums inspired by and written in-situ at the Thankful Villages. 54 villages are to be covered, including Welbury, North Yorkshire, not in the 53 listed above.

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